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How are we to explain the omnipresence of the soul? Does it
depend upon the definite magnitude of the material universe
coupled with some native tendency in soul to distribute itself
over material mass, or is it a characteristic of soul apart from
body?
In the latter case, soul will not appear just where body may
bring it; body will meet soul awaiting it everywhere; wheresoever
body finds place, there soul lay before ever body was; the entire
material mass of the universe has been set into an existent soul.
But if soul spread thus wide before material extension existed,
then as covering all space it would seem to be of itself a thing
of magnitude, and in what mode could it exist in the All before
the All was in being, before there was any All? And who can
accept a soul described as partless and massless and yet, for all
that absence of extension, extending over a universe? We may
perhaps be told that, though extended over the corporeal, it does
not itself become so: but thus to give it magnitude as an
accidental attribute leaves the problem still unsolved: precisely
the same question must in all reason arise: How can the soul take
magnitude even in the move of accident?
We cannot think of soul being diffused as a quality is, say
sweetness or colour, for while these are actual states of the
masses affected so that they show that quality at every point,
none of them has an independent existence; they are attributes of
body and known only as in body; such quality is necessarily of a
definite extension. Further, the colour at any point is
independent of that at any other; no doubt the Form, White, is
the same all over, but there is not arithmetical identity; in
soul there is; it is one soul in foot and in hand, as the facts
of perception show. And yet in the case of qualities the one is
observably distributed part for part; in the soul the identity is
undistributed; what we sometimes call distribution is simply
omnipresence.
Obviously, we must take hold of the question from the very
beginning in the hope of finding some clear and convincing theory
as to how soul, immaterial and without magnitude, can be thus
broad-spread, whether before material masses exist or as
enveloping them. Of course, should it appear that this
omnipresence may occur apart from material things, there is no
difficulty in accepting its occurrence within the material.
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